1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to surgical instrument targeting and guidance systems. In preferred aspects, the present invention relates to targeting and guidance systems for spinal surgery instrumentation.
2. Background
When performing minimally invasive percutaneous spinal surgery on a prone lying patient (such as when accessing the patient's intervertebral area for the insertion of intervertebral inserts or performing a discectomy) the various necessary surgical tools and/or inserts should preferably access the patient's spine in a posterolateral approach which is co-planar to the intervertebral plane passing between two selected adjacent vertebrae. Maintaining accurate positioning and guidance of surgical tools in this intervertebral plane has proven quite difficult to achieve in practice. Such positioning difficulties are further complicated by the fact that the intervertebral plane passing between any two adjacent vertebrae will be unique to that pair of adjacent vertebrae. This is due to natural lordotic spinal curvature, sagittal plane variances as well as coronal plane variances.
The problems encountered in positioning surgical tools in preferred orientations are not limited to positioning tools with respect to a patient's intervertebral space. Rather, it has proved difficult to position surgical tools with respect to many other locations in the body. Accordingly, what is desired is a surgical guideframe which is particularly well suited to quickly and easily position one or more surgical instruments at a selected location with respect to the patient. Most preferably, what is desired is a surgical instrument positing system which suspends one or more surgical instruments at a preferred orientation in space such that the instrument(s) can be directed in a preferred path towards a target tissue. Specifically, such a system would be adapted to quickly and easily position a surgical instrument both within a selected plane passing through the patient and at a selected angle within the selected plane.